1. Jim Hamilton discusses the merits of a college football playoff. I particularly like his point 2 on the likelihood of (or dislikelihood of) a college football playoff ending up with the best team winning.
2. A discussion of the costs to stockholders of the Tiger Woods scandal, estimated by two UC-Davis professors. (H/T The Sports Economist) (For full paper. Warning: the paper has not yet been peer-review, and I have not fully examined it yet myself, either.)
I was quoted in the Sunday edition of the New Orleans Times-Picayune on the impact of the Saints' success this season on the local economy. I am a little worried about not doing too many more of these interviews as it seems to be bad luck. Iowa lost their first game a week and a half after a story quoting me, and the Saints lost their first game this past Saturday before the story was even published.
I do not have much to add on this topic, but I figured I would provide a series of links to some interesting discussion of the cost to Tiger Woods of his transgressions.
http://thesportseconomist.com/2009/12/tiger-financial-fallout.htm
http://www.cnbc.com/id/34411400 (H/T)
http://thesportsbizblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/tiger-departs-scene-but-will-his.html
http://thesportsbizblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/tiger-endorsements-update-accenture.html Specifically on Accenture.
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2009/12/tiger-woods-will-pay-15-million-per.html (H/T) Estimate of the cost in lost endorsements.
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2009/12/tax-consequences-of-tiger-woods.html (H/T) On the tax implications.
Congress has decided to try and force a playoff on college football I-FBS. Many blogs are opposed to Congressional involvement (for instance Coyote Blog, Market Power, Cranky Con, and Café Hayek). Some of those writers may actually favor a playoff but are opposed to Congressional involvement or think that it has more important matters to deal with. I am opposed to Congressional involvement both because I oppose their objective but also based on principle that Congress should stay out of it. However, if a college football playoff keeps Congress from having time for another Cash for Clunkers or similar program, I will make that trade.
One of my biggest concerns about a college-football playoff is the problem of playoff creep, i.e. that the number of teams would increase over time. A four-team or an eight-team playoff might end up with the best team winning fairly often, but a 16, 24 or 32 team playoff could have a very low correlation between the best teams and the championship teams. However, there is always going to be a debate about who should be the last team in, so there will always be pressure to include more teams. As further evidence of my point, the NCAA basketball tournament is considering increasing the number of teams from 65 to 96. As a fan of William and Mary, I probably should applaud this as it may be the only chance for my team to finally get to the NCAA tournament. Well, maybe they won't need help this year. Regardless, I think this proposal would have a huge negative effect on the importance of the regular season.
The four key effects on the importance of the regular season:
1) The big conference teams will be able to get in with a lower number of wins. Assume that all of the teams that made the NCAA tournament plus all of the NIT at-large teams plus NIT automatic bid team Davidson would have made a 96-team tournament in 2008. Then add in three additional teams, which using the NCAA's methodology, I guess to be Cincinnati, Houston and Nevada. That would mean the seven BCS conferences would get the following number of teams into the playoffs:
ACC: 9 of 12
Big 10: 9 of 11
Big 12: 9 of 12
Big East: 11 of 16
Pac 10: 7 of 10
SEC: 7 of 12
Only five BCS conference teams with a winning record would have missed out. Three of those teams were in the relatively weaker SEC (Ole Miss, Vanderbilt and Alabama), and the other two were barely above .500, Seton Hall (16-15) and NC State (16-14).
2) The potential 1, 2 and 3 seeds will have less to play for. The key gains for being a 1 seed as opposed to a 2 seed are that you avoid playing the likely other best teams in the country until the Final Four (other 1 seeds) and that you get an easier game in the first round. There has never been a 16 seed to beat a 1 seed and only four times has a 15 beaten a 2. Part of the reason is that the 1 and 2 seeds should be the best teams in the country, but another reason is that the 15 and 16 seeds are substantially worse than even the 14 and 13 seeds. There is a tremendous drop-off in quality of teams moving from 13 to 14 to 15 to 16. The last upset by a 15 seed was in 2001, and one reason for that is because the committee has gotten better at seeding the low seeds. The top teams get a real advantage by getting a top seed, playing a much weaker opponent and it gives them a little incentive to play well during the season. However, if the tournament expands to 96 teams, the 1 seeds will play the winner of the 16-17 game, which will now be a much better team. Last year, it would have included teams such as Kansas State, Kentucky and Tulsa. The old 15 and 16 seeds would now be 23 and 24 seeds and likely out of the tournament by the time the top teams play. The difference between being a 1 or 6 seed would drop considerably.
3) The mid majors would actually increase their at large bids. My projections of last year's tournament would have added at-large bids for the WCC, CAA, MAAC, Southern and MVC (2 teams) conferences. Those conferences had no at large bids last year. The mid-majors' regular season might actually influence their likelihood of playing in the tournament.
4) There would be a big difference between being an 8 seed and being a 9 seed, since the 8 seeds would have a bye and the 9 seeds would not. Teams at this borderline would have an incentive to win their last games to avoid an extra game.
If the key factor is making the regular season meaningful, reasons 1 and 2 argue against increasing, while 3 and 4 would argue in favor of increasing. It seems to me that the first two reasons are more important than the last two. Reason 4 only applies to a particular type of middling team. Reason 3 could be lessened if the committee would select a few more mid-majors for a 64-team tournament. In particular, the large conferences, which get the most attention, would have a particularly reduced importance to the regular season.
A few weeks ago, I got a link to a great website that discusses the pros and cons of a playoff in college football, the National Championship Issue. There are a series of articles on a possible playoff. The introduction can be found at:
http://thenationalchampionshipissue.blogspot.com/2009/05/arguments-for-against-di-college.html
and an index of the arguments:
http://thenationalchampionshipissue.blogspot.com/2007/05/index-of-arguments.html
A couple of links:
As a follow-up to my earlier post on my article on a college football playoff, I will be expanding on the issue of a four-team playoff.
There are a number of issues related to problems with a college football playoff. Here are the key ones for me:
That last point I will expand on in a later post.
In many respects there is already a playoff system. It is just a playoff with two teams. So there has already been a little bit of destruction on points 1 and 2 with the creation of the BCS. In terms of fairness, I think a legitimate argument could be made that a four-team playoff might be optimal in terms of "fairness". It only has two rounds, so the probability of the best team getting upset is not extremely high. In general the regular season would still matter. However, even here there would be exceptions, such as the upcoming SEC championship. If Alabama and Florida win out, so that either team's only loss is to the other, I think they would have a pretty compelling case for inclusion in a 4-team playoff. If 2 out of the 3 of Boise St., TCU and Cincinnati lose out, the loser of the SEC championship game would almost be guaranteed of going to a four-team playoff. That result would seem to make that game pretty anti-climactic. If Boise State, TCU, Texas, Cinci and the SEC champion are undefeated there would still be at least one undefeated team missing out on a four-team playoff. The argument in that scenario would be that the optimal number of teams in the playoffs this year would be six. Even in the season most mentioned for needing a playoff, 2004, there were three contending teams (all with one loss), and then a mishmash of teams with two losses. A three team playoff might have been optimal in that year but even then there would be controversy over who got the bye week.
These cases all point to the likelihood that the playoffs would ever-be expanding. A four-team playoff excluding Boise State and TCU would lead to calls for an eight-team playoff so that those teams could be included. Then the ACC and Pac-10 would call for an automatic bid, since they'd be missing out on the post-season, and a sixteen-team playoff with eight automatic bids would be created. The Sun Belt, Conference USA, the MAC and Notre Dame would then want their own automatic bid, and the play-offs would be expanded to 24 teams.
My one compromise solution would be a +1 system. The bowls would go back to the old system of conference tie-ins, i.e., the Rose Bowl with the Pac-10 and Big 10, and the Sugar Bowl with the SEC champion. Then a week later there would be a National Championship game between two of the bowl winners. The system would bring back a lot of the tradition of the bowl games, allow the regular season to mean something, and give the smaller conference teams a chance to prove themselves in a bowl game to see if they are worthy of playing for the national championship. Also, it would hopefully limit the amount of playoff creep by keeping the bowls in place.
Belichick is getting blasted for his decision to go for two late in the game against the Colts last night (see here, here, here and probably a hundred other places). A detailed statistical analysis seems to suggest that it was actually the right call. See these posts (1, 2) at the pro-footballreference.com blog and this one at Advance NFL Stats. For a less cerebral analysis in support of the decision see Merril Hoge.
One last point. It seems from this video that Peyton Manning was not happy about the Patriots going for it at the time. Since football games are zero-sum games, what is good for the Colts is necessarily bad for the Patriots. If the Colts want them to punt, then the best thing for the Patriots is to not punt. However, this analysis assumes rationality on the part of both teams, which may not be a correct assumption.
Tim Kane and I have a new article at RealClearSports arguing that a college football playoff would be less "fair" in determining a national champion than the current system. I hope to have a couple of smaller follow-up posts here in the next couple of days.
Tim is a friend of mine from graduate school who blogs regularly at Growthology.
Has Chase Utley gone from Bobby Grich to Derek Jeter in one World Series? Grich is one of the most overlooked players in recent history. I remember reading in Ryne Sandberg's autobiography that at the start of Sandberg's second year the team said that they wanted to turn him into a second baseman like Grich. At the time I had no idea who Grich was* but have since realized he was a really good player. Jeter is a great player who is often overrated by the media.
For the last few years I have felt that Utley has been the overlooked star of the Phillies. Utley has the profile of a player that is likely to be overlooked as he does many things well (hit for power, get on base, really good defense). Well, with his recent heroics in the World Series things may have begun swinging completely the other way (see here and for the counter argument).
* I have become more obsessed with baseball in the last 13 years.
One of the more interesting topics in sports economics lately has been the market for cupcakes in college football, teams who are brought in just to get beat. These payouts can be quite profitable for small schools that cannot make big money selling tickets to their home games. Phil Miller and Stephen Karlson point to a story on Michigan bringing in Delaware State just to get beat. Delaware State had to forfeit a conference game to play the game:
You see, the Michigan Wolverines dangled $550,000 in front of the Hornets to play this Saturday. The only catch Delaware State already had a conference game set against North Carolina A&T set for that date.
So what did the Hornets do? Well what every Football Championship Series team would do: forfeit the conference game, take the money and, oh yeah, lose to Michigan 63-6.
I will quibble with one point made. I do not think every FCS (I-AA) school would do that. I do not think any team that has a shot at a playoff spot would make that decision. Also, FCS has a lot of schools that have long histories and reputations to protect. It is hard to imagine schools with prestigious reputations like William and Mary, Lafayette, or the Ivy League schools forfeiting a game for a payout. Also schools with strong reputations as top teams in FCS, even if they are having non-playoff seasons such as Georgia Southern, would not make this decision. Most of the schools most in need of the money may not feel comfortable enough with their position in their conference to forfeit a conference game. Because the MEAC is a conference made up specifically of HBC schools the connections between the schools may be stronger, and Delaware State might have been less concerned about punishment from the conference.
Given all of the reasons above, there are probably only a handful of teams in FCS that would make a similar decision.
Minor league baseball is returning to Richmond, as the AA Connecticut Defenders will move there next year (H/T Sabernomics). Richmond for a long time had the AAA franchise of the Atlanta Braves. Before last season the team moved to Gwinnett County in exurban Atlanta. One advantage of this move was that having a AAA franchise nearby is advantageous to the major league team, since AAA players are often being called up to the major league team. However, the major issue was that Gwinnett County agreed to build a new stadium, while the park in Richmond was "old" (1985). J.C. at Sabernomics has covered the issue extensively over the last year (see here, here, here and many more).
A few years ago (data from 2003, published in 2006) I did a study looking at the relationship between minor league baseball team locations and various factors (population, income, distance from major league teams, etc.). However, it does not include stadium age or quality, which I was treating as an endogenous factor, i.e., a large city will have more resources to invest/waste on a ballpark. Over time baseball teams have distributed themselves very efficiently with few outliers from the predicted pattern. Table 6 of my paper presents the biggest outliers for AAA, AA, High-A and the metropolitan areas with no teams. According to the model, Richmond should have either a AAA or AA team (leaning towards AAA). If Richmond did not have a team at the time of the study, it would have been 5th on the AAA list and 1st on the other three. Richmond with no baseball team is clearly underrepresented by baseball.
Regardless of the stadium issues associated with the Richmond Diamond, the appeal of the Richmond market relative to Norwich, CT was too much for the Defenders' new ownership to ignore. Richmond's metropolitan area population in 2007 was 1,211,101, while Norwich's was 263,770. An additional one million potential fans can make up for a large number of other problems.
Was Chicago actually fairly close to winning the vote for the 2016 Olympics? Given the discussion of Chicago finishing 4th, only getting 18 of 94 votes, and being eliminated right off the bat, this would be very much in conflict to conventional wisdom. However, my intention in this post is to show that it is possible that Chicago could have come close to winning or even have won the final vote with just a few more votes in the first round of voting.
To look at whether Chicago may have been close to winning, first we need to look at the voting results:
City | Round 1 Votes | Round 2 | Round 3 |
Rio | 26 | 46 | 66 |
Madrid | 28 | 29 | 32 |
Tokyo | 22 | 20 | |
Chicago | 18 |
This implies the following revealed preferences of the voters:
Name | # of Voters | 1st Choice | 2nd Choice | 3rd Choice | 4th Choice |
Rio | 26 | R | ? | ? | ? |
Chicago | 18 | C | R | ? | ? |
Madrid | 28 | M | ? | ? | ? |
Tokyo | 21 | T | C/R | C/R/M | C/M |
The Tokyo voters preferred Rio to Madrid, but it is not clear where Chicago fell in their rankings. So if Chicago could have survived the first round, even barely, the preferences of the voters are consistent with a possible comeback victory for Chicago.
The second key to victory under this scenario would have been a few voters who could have switched to Chicago in the first round, especially if they switched from Tokyo. There may be some evidence of that possibility:
Some IOC members theorized that a few voters who liked Chicago actually voted for Tokyo in the first round, figuring the American city would get through easily and not wanting the Japanese capital to be embarrassed.
Now this is all speculative, but it is at least possible. I will present four scenarios based on feasible preferences of voters. In each case I will transfer three votes from Tokyo to Chicago to begin with. I will not include any strategic voting, i.e., each voter votes for their highest remaining choice. I will also assume that all voters' preferences remain the same once the voting changes. Lastly, I will also ignore the fact that the vote totals increased after the first round.
Scenario 1: Chicago, 2nd Choice City (Chicago Ultimately Wins)
Name | # of Voters | 1st Choice | 2nd Choice | 3rd Choice | 4th Choice |
Rio | 26 | R | C | M | T |
Chicago | 21 | C | R | M | T |
Madrid | 28 | M | C | R | T |
Tokyo1 | 15 | T | C | R | M |
Tokyo2 | 4 | T | R | C | M |
The original Tokyo voters are broken into two groups based on whether Chicago or Rio is their second choice. Changing the three voters from Tokyo to Chicago eliminates Tokyo in the first round (19 for Tokyo). In the second round Madrid is eliminated (C: 36, R:30, M:28). Finally Chicago ends up winning in the final round over Rio, 58-36. Chicago would beat any of the other cities head-to-head. In this scenario all that would be needed would be to survive the first round.
Scenario 2: Tokyo to Chicago, Madrid to Rio (Chicago Ultimately Wins)
Name | # of Voters | 1st Choice | 2nd Choice | 3rd Choice | 4th Choice |
Rio | 26 | R | C | M | T |
Chicago | 21 | C | R | M | T |
Madrid | 28 | M | R | C | T |
Tokyo | 19 | T | C | R | M |
The scenario begins the same as Scenario 1, as Tokyo is eliminated in the first round. Under this scenario however, Rio is eliminated in round 2 (C:40, M:28, R:26) as the Tokyo voters all switch to Chicago. In the final round, Chicago wins handily 66-28 as the Rio voters vote for their second choice, Chicago. The interesting aspect of this scenario is that Rio would have beaten Chicago head-to-head, 54-40. So, Rio wins if Chicago cannot survive the first round. Chicago wins if Rio cannot survive the second round. Rio wins if they both make it to the finals.
Scenario 3: Madrid Wins
Name | # of Voters | 1st Choice | 2nd Choice | 3rd Choice | 4th Choice |
Rio | 26 | R | M | C | T |
Chicago | 21 | C | R | M | T |
Madrid | 28 | M | C | R | T |
Tokyo | 23 | T | C | R | M |
Tokyo is eliminated in the first round and Rio in the second round. In this case however, the Rio voters prefer Madrid to Chicago and Madrid wins the final vote.
Scenario 4: Conventional Wisdom before Voting (Rio Ultimately Wins)
Name | # of Voters | 1st Choice | 2nd Choice | 3rd Choice | 4th Choice |
Rio | 26 | R | C | M | T |
Chicago | 21 | C | R | M | T |
Madrid1 | 18 | M | C | R | T |
Madrid2 | 10 | M | R | C | T |
Tokyo1 | 9 | T | C | R | M |
Tokyo2 | 10 | T | R | C | M |
As in the previous three scenarios, Tokyo is eliminated first. The second round allows Chicago and Rio to advance to the finals (R:36, C:30, M:28). Finally, Rio wins the final vote, 54-40.
The key to all of the above possibilities is that they are consistent with the revealed preferences of the voters (with the exception of the three voters whose votes are changed from Tokyo to Chicago). It is also consistent with the geographical solidarity that the voters seem to exhibit.
The scenarios where Chicago ultimately succeeds are probably not the most likely, as there seems to have been a lot of sentimental support for Rio. Scenario 4 seems the most likely to me, but a variation of scenario where Chicago barely beats Rio in the final round certainly seem plausible to me.
Welcome to my new blog. I hope this to be a place where I can post analyses at the intersection of economics and sports.
